Con Job (15 page)

“So, Vince.” Detective Martin’s expression was gentle but firm. “Tell us about the financial state of the con.”

Vince interlaced his fingers and set his elbows on the table. “It wasn’t supposed to work out like this.”

“It rarely is. Tell us what went wrong.”

Jacob sat very still. No one had asked him to leave, and Vince seemed resigned to openness, but there was no point to taking chances.

“Con Job has been running for eight years. It’s done pretty well for itself; the con has been self-sufficient for five years. It’s been making enough money to even pay a little bit to the key staffers, the department heads.”

“Is that unusual?”

“Depends on the con. Some of your biggest cons or industry cons have paid staff, but a lot of the smaller and middling cons are all volunteer-run. That is, they have staff, and they have volunteers, but the staff don’t get paid, either.”

“What makes someone staff, then?”

“Higher position, more authority, and some perks — staff get comped rooms at the hotel, shared, and meals in the staff suite. When we have one.” He gestured to encompass the stripped room around them.

“So Con Job was in the black. What happened?”

Vince sighed. “I sort of borrowed some money. But it would have been fine if we hadn’t been robbed.”

“If you use words like ‘sort of borrowed’ and ‘robbed,’ I’m going to have to ask you to explain further.”

“Yes, I took some money out of Con Job’s accounts for my personal use. It was kind of owed to me, you know? I’ve been chairing this con for six years, I basically got it to this level, and I hadn’t ever been paid, not really. Last year I got a check for seventy-eight dollars. That’s not a lot for thousands of man-hours.”

“Couldn’t you have asked for more payment?”

“Yeah, but…. No one chairs a con to make money. We do it for the fans. It would have looked bad.”

“It looks a lot worse when you just embezzle it.”

“Embezzling is stealing,” Vince said quickly. “I wasn’t stealing. I was borrowing. It was going to go back in the con’s account before anyone realized it was missing.”

Rita shook her head. “Vince, when you borrow something without asking permission, especially money, that’s called stealing.”

Jacob glanced at Daniel, who looked strained and sad.

“I needed liquid funds. I was going to put it back. We would have been fine if not for Ted.”

“Who’s Ted?”

“He’s the vice-chair,” Rita said, looking perplexed, “or was. He quit, which was kind of a nightmare right before the con. We were all upset with him, but Vince said to just let him go.”

Vince rubbed at his forehead. “Ted had made withdrawals, too. And he’d done a lot of other things for a while, charging in expenses to the con for his own services and products. Some of it wasn’t anything we could really prosecute for, like he rewrote a single line in our guest contract and charged Con Job almost a thousand dollars in consulting fees. That’s not actually illegal, just really slimy. We were just as well off without him.”

“And was it all legal but underhanded stuff?”

“No.” Vince sighed. “He also made withdrawals on the con account. And he wasn’t intending to pay them back.”

“But you couldn’t press charges against him without bringing your own withdrawals to light.”

“Right. And I didn’t have the money paid back yet. And he knew I couldn’t do anything about him, and he said he’d counter-accuse me if anyone from the con tried to go after him legally. So I thought we could hold the con as usual, I could pay back the money, and then I’d look at the accounts and see if we could press charges.”

“So,” said Detective Martin, “you and this Ted both took money from the con funds, so neither of you could accuse the other without risking exposure of your own embezzlement.”

This time Vince didn’t protest the word. “Basically, yeah. Only I was really going to pay the con back. Ted took thousands. Tens of thousands. It was after the con last year, when I took out the money. We had time before we would need to make any new payments, it seemed like the best time to do it. But Ted noticed, and when I said I was going to pay everything back before it was missed, he said I couldn’t prove that and he could report me to the rest of the staff and press charges. But he wasn’t going to, he said, because he was just going to do it too, and I couldn’t do anything about it.”

“So he did.”

“It was a nightmare. He took so much more, and it was never coming back. So I had to cut costs in any way I could, and I made a big deal about getting corporate sponsorship this year.”

“That’s why you made us go back to the dark ages with our registration system,” Rita said.

“And a lot of other things, like less food in the green room and a lighter staff suite and a whole host of other things. Oh, man, it was killer, trying to keep it hidden from everyone.”

“I hope not,” said Detective Martin pointedly.

Vince looked at her. “Oh, no. No, I didn’t kill anyone. I wouldn’t. I couldn’t.”

“Really? Because it sounds like Valerie Kimberton’s sponsorship with MEGAN!ME was your ticket off the nightmare coaster, and then she threatened to pull her sponsorship, and then she ended up dead.”

“I didn’t kill her,” Vince said firmly. “I’m not sorry she’s dead, and maybe it’s wrong of me to say that, and maybe stupid of me to say it, but I didn’t kill her.”

“Tell me how Valerie Kimberton fit in.”

“You’re right, she and MEGAN!ME were a big part of getting Con Job afloat. It seemed like a reasonable deal: MEGAN!ME got the back cover, the inside front cover, three interior ad spaces, a lot of mentions in the copy and programming, and special vendor space. We even have a MEGAN!ME video track showing their featured titles running nonstop in one video room all weekend. She got plenty of exposure for her money.”

“People say she was hard to work with.”

Vince snorted. “That’s a pretty minimalist way to say it.”

“Why did she threaten to pull her sponsorship?”

“Which time?”

Detective Martin’s pen hesitated. “She did it more than once?”

“Oh, yeah. On Friday she was mad about a typo in the programs — the exclamation mark was left out of the MEGAN!ME name, in an article. Not even in an ad or a headline, but in a write-up. It shouldn’t have been anything but a mistake, but she wanted all-new programs printed.” He shrugged. “By then I wasn’t taking her quite so seriously. She’d scared me a lot worse before, when she threatened to pull out a month ago and then again last week. That was over an article, which we dropped from the program book to make her happy, and then because we were giving
The Last Days of Manhattan
a featured viewing, and it’s not a MEGAN!ME title. Like it was suddenly a MEGAN!ME con, all MEGAN!ME all the time, which wasn’t ever the deal.”

“So you weren’t really afraid she was going to pull the money and walk?”

“Well, yeah, at first I was. And then still a little bit on Friday, because I figured she had dirty lawyers who could argue that the MEGAN!ME brand had been misrepresented or something, and Con Job sure didn’t have money to fight. Our only lawyer-type was the paralegal who had taken our money and run.” Vince seemed a little more sure of himself now that they were speaking of Valerie and not his own crimes. “But I didn’t kill her.”

“Did you want to?”

“And give her dirty lawyers something else to hold over us? She’s the kind of person who’d be thrilled from beyond the grave to nail us with a wrongful death suit or something. No way.”

Daniel cleared his throat and spoke for the first time. “Why’d you take the money, Vince?”

Vince’s expression seemed to melt into sadness and regret. “I needed it. For Charlie. And I was going to pay it back.”

“Who’s Charlie?” asked Detective Martin, but Daniel and Rita had already subtly changed their postures.

Rita’s eyebrows drew in and upward. “Charlie?”

Vince nodded once, and then he answered Detective Martin. “My son. My ex-wife has him. He’s got — he’s got some problems. Insurance wouldn’t cover it, said his autism is medical but behavior problems aren’t covered. And he needed some specialized help.”

“What’d you do?”

“I took enough to pay for a few sessions with a therapist. She sent Charlie to work with a specialist, someone who could work with him and — it’s going good. They think he can get into a special program at school, which is amazing progress, and last time I visited him he even wanted to click me with his little clicker.” He swallowed. “It was worth it. Totally worth it. And I’m paying it back, about seventy-five percent now. I only took a few thousand, to pay for the sessions and Terri’s gas and hotel — that’s my ex-wife — and money so she could take off work to go with him. It’s mostly back already.”

Daniel swore. “Why didn’t you just ask for help, man?”

Vince’s head drooped. “Who’s got six thousand dollars sitting around? Who would just lend it to someone, if they did?”

“You might be surprised,” Daniel said sadly.

Rita ran a finger beneath one eye. “You were talking about you and Terri the other day,” she said. “How things were better.”

“Yeah.” Vince swallowed. “We — that is — we’d never tell him, of course, but Charlie was…. It was really hard, living with a special needs kid, and we didn’t know how to do it. Not at first. And we split. But after Charlie got help, and Terri says she’s been learning a lot about how to teach him, and we… it’s been better. A lot better. And Terri said she’d like to see us maybe try things out again.”

“That’s going to be hard if you’re in prison,” Daniel said heavily. “Man, Vince….”

“I know. I know. You don’t even have to tell me. I’m sorry.” He rubbed at his forehead again. “But for Charlie. I had to.”

“That’s all we’ll need from you at the moment,” Detective Martin said, a little sharply. “Thank you. Rita, you can go, too.”

Vince rose and walked from the room, not looking back, and Rita followed.

Detective Martin swore and threw her pen at the ground. “Am I supposed to be the cop who built her career on the guy who stole to get his autistic kid an education and then was even paying it back? Oh, there’s no good way out of this one.”

Daniel sighed. “Nope.”

Detective Martin glanced at Jacob. “And I don’t think he’s our murderer, anyway. He only had to ride out Kimberton a little bit longer, so if he snapped and killed her, it would have been an act of impulse violence, not something premeditated like poison. And it doesn’t do a thing to explain Kurlansky and our latest victim, the dead zombie.”

“The guy’s a friend of mine, so I might be biased,” said Daniel, “but I think you’re right.” He looked at Jacob. “Got any ideas?”

Jacob blew out his breath. “Everybody’s got something here,” he said. “But most of them aren’t killing for it, I don’t think.”

“All it takes is one,” sighed Detective Martin. “Man, I hope he can get that money back in the bank before this settles. It’d be great to have nothing missing when it comes up.”

“But he—” Jacob stopped himself. “He didn’t confess anything. He just talked with us.”

“And anything we repeat would be hearsay,” she agreed, “not admissible as evidence. If the money’s all back, the case would be dropped, and I wouldn’t be the baddest bad cop of all time.” She rolled her eyes. “Like not having kids yet isn’t enough — if my mom and aunts found out I’d booked a guy for taking care of his autistic kid, I’d have to change my name.”

“Yeah.”

Jacob’s stomach rumbled, and he wondered how long it had been since dinner. Had he had dinner? He couldn’t remember. There had been the Expecto Pastrami from the food truck, but had he eaten since then?

“I think I’ll get something from the snack table, too,” he said. He stood and stopped. “Oh, Sam’s got my wallet.”

“You can catch her,” said Detective Martin. “Unless things have significantly changed, she’ll still be in line.”

“You guys want anything?”

“A perp in cuffs,” said Detective Martin.

Jacob saw Sam and Lydia from the escalator. They waved to him, holding bags of M&Ms, and he waved back and jogged to meet them. “You’re through! Detective Martin thought you’d still be in line.”

“Yeah, they’re being pretty efficient. Necessity, I guess. But it sounds like they’ll be out of stuff soon.”

“Vince was trying to order pizzas, so maybe they’ll come soon. Can I have my wallet? I want to grab something, too.”

Sam looked at him. “I don’t have it.”

“I gave it to you downstairs, remember?”

“And I took five bucks out and left it on the counter, where you put it.” Her eyes widened. “I’m sorry, I thought you saw me.”

“Better hurry,” Lydia said.

Jacob turned and ran down the opposite escalator — though that was silly, and if the wallet were gone then hurrying wouldn’t change that. He sprinted across the lobby and reached the Con Ops room, and there was the wallet, brown and rubbed and creased, lying on the pass-through.

Daniel looked up at him, and Jacob held it up. “Kind of needed this.”

He held up the wallet to Sam and Lydia, riding the escalator down, and they cheered. He had just made it to the mezzanine again when his phone buzzed. He glanced down to find a text from Jessica.
OMG, is it true?

That depends on what *it* is,
he wrote back.
Pluto is no longer a planet. There is no Santa Claus.

A moment later his phone rang. “Oh, you’re hilarious,” Jessica laughed, “but you’re not getting out of it that easily. I mean the picture.”

“What picture?”

“Have you seriously not seen it yet?”

“I’ve been a little busy here, Jessica, what with the con and the murders and the creepers and the zombies and all.”

“Fine, I get it. I’m talking about — oh, hang on, I’m coming down.”

She hung up, and Jacob mentally shrugged. If Jessica couldn’t find a legitimate cause, she’d invent one. She was always getting excited about something.

“Jacob, can you go out and meet the pizza guy?” Vince called. “He’s going to need help.”

“We got pizza?”

“I found a place that would deliver. I paid online, delivery and tip too, so you just have to get them to all the food stations.”

“Right.”

There wasn’t one pizza guy at the hotel entrance, but two, with pizza boxes stacked high on hotel luggage carts. “You must be having one helluva party,” one said.

“We’re trying,” Jacob answered. “If you’ll push those after me, we can drop them off where they belong.”

The hotel had provided paper plates, stacked on each table. Waiting attendees cheered from their line as Jacob led the pizzas to the first table. The delivery guys looked startled, and then they strutted and raised their arms for the applause.

They left a dozen each of cheese and pepperoni pizzas at the first station, and another set at the second. By the time they had delivered the last, the first station’s line was halfway gone but the remaining attendees looked worried. “Is there gonna be enough?” they could hear someone call. “Should we go to another table?”

“You’re gonna need more pizzas,” said one of the delivery drivers.

“It was hard enough getting you guys,” Jacob said. “I get the feeling we’re kind of the only all-night convention that comes to this town. There’s just nothing around here open at night.”

“Yeah,” agreed the pizza guys. “Maybe we could ask the manager to call out. There’s got to be some locations further out that would be willing to drive in. I mean how often do you get to move eight dozen pizzas at a single sale?”

“Or maybe they’d just spot us the supplies. We were pretty tapped out after this; we were supposed to get restocked on Monday.”

“If you talk to him and if he can swing anything, let us know,” Jacob said. “I’m sure we’d be happy to get more if we can.”

“You got it,” the delivery guys said. “Tip on eight dozen pizzas isn’t too shabby, either.”

They waved and headed out the door. Jacob turned back into the lobby and nearly stumbled into Ryan Brazil. “Oh, sorry.”

“Me, too, Jacob.” Ryan smiled a tight little smile.

“What?”

“About what goes around coming around.”

Jacob tipped his head. “I’m not following.”

“You seemed to think it was fine to look over my shoulder and peek at my stuff. So I thought I’d take a peek at yours. Only fair, right?”

“I didn’t….”

“So I took a glance at your wallet, when you left it so conveniently available, and I was hoping I’d find something really juicy. But it was just your driver’s license and credit card. Pretty boring, you’d think — except yours wasn’t.”

Jacob’s stomach tightened. “What are you talking about?”

“It’s a different name than the one on your badge. Why is that, I wondered. And why was the name Jacob Tarston so familiar? And it was right on the edge of my brain, I just couldn’t remember.”

Jacob’s stomach finished tightening and started twisting. “Leave it alone, Ryan.”

“Oh, it’s too late for that. You should have left it alone before you started talking to the police about my perfectly legal friendship with an adult woman.” He pointed a finger at Jacob’s face. “It would have saved you a lot of trouble.”

The words were hard to form. “What did you do?”

“I remembered. I remembered spending a lot of days watching bad TV, eating cup ramen and hoping for a job. I remembered a dreadful little show about fat slutty women and their bratty, dysfunctional men — and a bratty, dysfunctional kid.”

Jacob stopped breathing.

“Have you really not noticed yet? I went to the front desk, asked them to put up a birthday message. They’re so upset by all the weird stuff about the kitchens and the food, they were more than happy to help do something nice for one of the con personnel. Your happy birthday is running on every agenda screen, every map, every in-room closed-circuit TV, pretty much every public screen on this hotel.”

Jacob tore his eyes from the grinning face and turned to scan the lobby. There, over the green couch, a large screen.
Welcome, Con Job!
it read. And as he watched, the screen split into vertical panels which rotated to the next message.
We deeply regret the inconvenience of our closed kitchens. Packaged foods are available at tables in the lobby, the convention center main hall, and on the mezzanine.

And then the screen split and rotated again, and Jacob’s face appeared, happy and smiling, his profile picture online.
Happy Birthday to Jacob Foster, once Little Jakey Tarston!
And beside that, an impossibly real photo from the past, a light-haired little boy with a twisted expression and one hand raised to the camera, the offending digit pixelated out but plainly inferable.

“Oh, there you are!” Jessica’s voice rang down to him, and he looked up. She was leaning over the railing on the mezzanine. “I’ve been looking for you. Have you seen it yet? Is it true? Everybody’s talking about it!” She laughed.

So did Ryan. “The only articles I could find said you’d left the family, tried to leave all that behind,” he said. “Nothing’s ever left behind, Jakey. Nothing.”

Jacob wanted to hit him, wanted to shove that smug evil grin up behind his nose and knock him to the floor, but his arms wouldn’t move. Ryan turned and strutted away, still chuckling, and Jessica’s phone flashed from the mezzanine. “Say cheese! Everyone online wants a pic. They’re all so surprised!”